Whumptober 2019- Embrace
by Frankie McStein
Summary: She was sure it was a cold. After running around in wet clothes all night it was only to be expected. But, if it was just a cold, why couldn't she breathe?


"She doesn't know the code! But I do." Higgins had very carefully refused to focus on the look Kumu had given her as she'd said that. She hadn't looked at the other woman at all as hands had wrapped themselves around her arms, squeezing tightly enough to hurt. She had nearly tripped over her own feet as she was dragged up the stairs, jerking her knee as she struggled to catch her balance.

They had taken her to the study so she could see the safe that she had insisted didn't exist and sat her in her own computer chair, zip ties cutting into her wrists. Lina had grinned at her, no emotion on her face at all, and pulled out a metal case.

She took a minute or so to talk, to tell Higgins about the ulnar nerve, about how it ran from the shoulder to the beds of the fingernails. About how it was unprotected. And then she opened the case to reveal long, thin needles.

Higgins had only grunted as Lina had pushed the first needle into her arm, clenching her jaw tightly, breathing heavily through her nose. But then Sam had reached out and flicked the end of the needle, and Higgins had yelped at the fire that ran the length of her arm.

"Code." Lina's voice was cold, professional, and it actually helped. Higgins had been interrogated before, had trained for it. Lina and Sam were the ones asking the questions, which meant Higgins was the one with the power. She could drag this out, ruin their plans.

She'd clung to the thought as she screamed as Lina pressed a needle into her shoulder and wiggled it firmly. The pain had grown and grown, spreading into her head, building like pressure. It left her gasping for breath when Lina had finally let go of the needle.

Sam had leant in close and crooned something about how wonderful the needles were, how they caused so much pain and left such small amounts of damage.

"Visible damage, anyway," and he had laughed as he'd said it before flicking the needle in Higgins' arm again and again, a rapid pattern that had left her with tears trickling down her face and black spots dancing in her vision.

"Code," came the demand again, barely audible over the sound of Higgins' panting.

Sam had grabbed her jaw, looked at her, then frowned at Lina and said, "This isn't working fast enough."

They'd cut her free, dragged her out to the pond, forced her upside down into a lounger. She'd known what they were planning before Lina had gone looking for a bottle, before Sam had started fiddling with a piece of cloth. She'd reminded herself that she had chosen to do this, that defending the estate was her job and that she needed to know what she was dealing with so she could perform her duties.

And then neither of them had asked her anything. They had pinned her down, and Lina emptied the bottle over her face, pouring with deliberate slowness.

After she passed out the first time, a few slaps to her cheek had woken her up. Lina had demanded the code, and Higgins had taken advantage to push a little, to try to figure out what on earth was so important.

The knowledge that they wanted Magnum had hit her like a physical blow. She'd dropped her head back and, in the second before the water flooded her nose and mouth again, focused on Magnum, his voice, his smile. There was no question of her handing him over to them. There was just quiet determination.

When she passed out the second time, it had taken a punch to the stomach to bring her back; she had felt the burn of it as she'd gasped for breath. Lina had taken to telling her she could make it all stop while Sam had taken to threatening Kumu.

The third time, she had woken up lying on the ground, throat burning as she'd gagged and coughed. The pain in her chest told her someone had performed CPR.

She'd been dragged back to the cellar, dreading the chill of the climate-controlled room; she was already shivering, partly from the water and partly from stress and shock. She'd wanted to resist, fight back, but instead she'd let herself be pushed to the floor and tied back up.

Kumu had been horrified by the state she was in, shuffling across the floor to sit next to her in an attempt to warm her up.

And then, when they'd gotten out, she'd had to go tearing about the estate.

And while they'd been tracking Butler, she'd still been in her wet clothes.

And she still hadn't changed or even sat down before they'd gone chasing after Magnum.

They'd been held at the warehouse for a while. It seemed like every cop on the island had at least one question they just had to ask that couldn't possibly wait. When Magnum had been driven off, protesting, in an ambulance, Katsumoto had given her an odd look and asked if he should be calling one for her too. But she had been so tired. Her arms were throbbing from the gunfight on top of their earlier abuse. Her chest felt too tight, her head felt light, her stomach was rolling. The idea of spending the night stuck in hospital, not sleeping, was horrific.

Instead, she'd begged Rick to drive her home, knowing he and T.C. would spend the night at Magnum's bedside. She hadn't even managed to shower before dropping to her bed, crying out quietly at the pain in her arms, and drifting off.

So it really wasn't any surprise that she felt awful now. Her head was heavy and her chest was hurting slightly. She tried taking a deep breath and ended up coughing hard enough to hurt her bruised stomach. She wanted to stay in bed, but she was thirsty, her throat burning slightly. And she wanted to find out how Magnum was doing.

So she forced herself to leave the warm little cocoon and, stumbling slightly as the world dipped, headed off downstairs.

"Morning!" He really was far too cheerful for a man who could only have been discharged no more than an hour ago.

"Good morning." She winced a little, her voice was hoarse and speaking hurt. She wandered over to the chair and sat heavily, her knees giving out as she tried to sit. There was a cup of coffee that she knew Magnum had poured for her. But the idea of putting anything in her stomach suddenly seemed so very unappealing.

"You'll be happy to know my skull isn't damaged," Magnum was saying, and she felt like she should reply, maybe even make a joke about his intelligence. But she just didn't have the energy. She somehow felt worse than she had when she'd woken up. The pain in her chest seemed to be getting worse, and she could feel her breathing picking up speed, feeling like she was panting but still not getting enough air.

"Higgy?"

"I don't feel all that great." That was an understatement. She felt utterly rotten. Cold water, cold room, wet clothes; clearly she had gone and caught a cold. Before she could say anything else, Magnum started talking about the lump on his head, the way his ears were still ringing from shots she had fired with her hands on his shoulder, the bruise on his arm from where he'd slammed into the floor after Rick had shot the chair leg out from under him.

She didn't feel able to explain about her cold. He had been attacked, knocked out, kidnapped, held against the arrival of some shadowy figure, and the entire time he'd had no way of knowing if his friends would find him in time. All she had was a blocked nose and a bit of a cough. It hardly measured up.

She spent the rest of the day taking decongestants and avoiding the three men in the guest house. It wasn't that she didn't want to see them more than she didn't want them thinking she was some weak little thing for not being able to handle a simple cold.

When Rick had wandered in and told her they were ordering Chinese, she had wanted to say yes, she'd love to join them. But her head was throbbing, her chest felt so tight, her throat wouldn't stop tickling no matter how much she coughed. She, instead, she had thanked him and said she'd already eaten.

Later, when T.C. had swung by and said they'd decided on a movie night and offered to let her pick the first film, she wanted nothing more than to head over to the guest house. But she was starting to feel out of breath just from sitting up, and she still hadn't managed to shake the chill that seemed to have settled in her bones. So she said she had to be up early for a delivery instead.

It was a testament to how awful she was feeling that she didn't notice how tense her two friends were. Or how painfully artificial their smiles and casual attitudes were. If she had noticed, she might have ignored her breathlessness to follow them, to find out what was going on. And she would have realised that she hadn't fooled any of them.

"You were right, Thomas," Rick had said after she'd refused to eat with them. "She doesn't seem like herself at all."

"Gotta agree with Rick," T.C. had said when he'd come back from inviting her to watch films with them. "She looks ill."

The three of them had put their heads together and plotted for a while. They hadn't come up with much of a plan besides making sure that there was plenty of bottled water in the fridge and lots of painkillers in the medicine cupboard. They all understood not wanting to be fussed over, but they also all wanted to help their Higgy.

Unfortunately, they didn't get the chance to do much. The next morning, ridiculously early thanks to the way she had been utterly incapable of sleeping, Higgins took the lads down to the beach for a run.

At least, they ran. She hadn't even tried. Just walking had led to her panting for breath and shaking slightly. So she was quite some way behind the dogs when a pain lanced through her chest. She gasped, doubled over, and started coughing. And she couldn't stop. Fear clawed at her as her head got light, her chest and stomach shaking as her lungs tried to inhale and exhale at the same time, and she felt like she was suffocating.

She realised she was on the sand, curled on her side, clawing at the sand in her panic. But she couldn't stop coughing, she couldn't move, she couldn't breathe. And everything went grey. And then black. And she was gone.

The lads, their attention caught by the unusual noise, had come bounding back over, nudging her as she fell. They stood by and whimpered until she passed out. Then their training kicked in.

_Sniff. Scent the area. Mistress is down. Look for a threat. No threat. Need a two-legs. Run, run. Small home. Annoying two-legs. Call Annoying two-legs. _

When Magnum, up early for a run, heard the barking at the door, his first reaction was to look over and make sure it was locked. His second was to call for Higgins and hope she was somewhere nearby with her demon dogs. But the barking went right on, interspersed with whines.

Whines? He'd heard them whine before, when Higgins had stopped them from ripping his arms off. But when they were trying to eat him? That was new.

He went to the door, peering out, and saw the two dogs sitting. Not pacing like they were about to start a hunt or scratching at the door like they thought they could make it disappear if they tried hard enough. But sitting. And barking. And whining.

This was officially strange. And he didn't like strange. Strange was… Well, not normal. He opened the door, slower than any door had ever opened in the history of doors, ready to slam it shut if either dog should show the slightest sign of moving toward him.

Instead, as soon as the latch turned, the two dogs jumped to their feet and ran away from the door, stopping a few feet away and looking back at him as if to ask what he thought he was playing at, just standing there.

_Annoying two-legs is here. Move, move. Not following. Follow, Annoying two-legs. Call. Call Annoying two-legs. Mistress needs a two-legs!_

Magnum watched as Zeus and Apollo darted back and forth. He'd realized they wanted him to follow them. What he couldn't decide was whether they wanted him for something important or whether this was just their latest Magnum-cidal ploy to get him alone somewhere where Higgins couldn't find them and save him.

He stepped through the door, regretting it as soon as he did. But the dogs just ran another few steps away from him.

_'Okay,'_ he thought, frowning at them. _'If they _do _kill me, I'm coming back as a ghost and hiding all of Higgins' coffee.'_

And he headed towards the Dobermans. They immediately took off at a run, clearly having decided he had finally gotten the point. Or just having gotten bored already. But the whining. The whining had bothered Magnum. So, in an interesting reversal of the usual scheme of things, he stretched out his legs and sprinted after them.

It didn't take long to reach the beach, the two dogs and ex-SEAL all being in excellent health. When Magnum saw the figure sprawled on the sand his eyes widened, adrenaline poured into his system, and he was dropping to his knees by Higgins in seconds.

"Higgins?" He could see her chest rising and falling much much faster than it should be. He could hear a wheezing, bubbling sort of sound in her breath. And he could feel her pulse racing.

"It's okay; just hang on, girl." He cursed himself for not grabbing his cell before realizing she would have hers and quickly finding it. The dogs didn't so much as growl as he put his hands on her, a sign of how very worried they were, how very serious the situation was.

"I need an ambulance at Robin's Nest," he snapped at the nine-one-one operator when the call connected, worry clipping his voice. "I'll meet them at the main gate. They're gonna need oxygen."

The wheeze was actually scaring him, making him think of collapsed lungs. He hadn't heard the whole story of what had happened with her while he'd been running all over the estate, but he wouldn't be surprised to find that she had fought the intruders with everything she had and picked up her fair share of injuries in the process.

She shifted slightly as he slid his hands under her and stood, a quiet groan escaping her.

"It's just me. It's just Magnum. I've got you." The last thing he wanted was a potentially confused and disoriented ex-spy, with what he was convinced was an assassin's training, waking up in his arms and panicking. He kept talking as he carried her to the gate, shadowed by the two terrifyingly silent dogs.

He worried for a moment if they would try to attack the EMTs when they took Higgins. But they just stood and watched as an oxygen mask was strapped over Higgins' face and she was loaded into the back of the ambulance.

Magnum headed back to get the Ferrari, grabbing his phone along with his keys and calling T.C., knowing his sunrise tour would have just landed.

"She's being taken to St. Katherine's. I have no idea what's wrong with her."

"I'll call Rick. We'll meet you there."

…

"How do you end up with pneumonia on a tropical island?" Rick sounded almost offended, like Higgins' lungs should have known better.

Higgins, her face so much paler than it should be, looked away from him. The three men frowned at each other; that wasn't the sort of reaction they'd have expected.

"What happened, Juliet?" Magnum's voice was gentle, full of concern. He put a hand on her shoulder as she continued to stare at the blanket that was doing nothing to help her feel warm.

"Sam and Lina wanted the code for the safe in the study. I told them I knew it." She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Why? Why would you do that?"

"As I explained to Kumu at the time, it was strategic. I believed us to be alone on the estate and needed to know what we were dealing with." She stopped with a wince, then coughed and rubbed a hand idly over the top of her chest. She tried to take a breath and say something else but coughed again and couldn't stop.

Magnum kept his one hand on her shoulder as his other moved to her back and rubbed hard, trying to help as she gasped for breath between coughs. She ended up hunched over, red-faced, tears in her eyes, her arms wrapped around her stomach and chest. T.C.'s hand was on her back below Magnum's, helping her stay upright, and Rick was holding out tissues for her to spit out the phlegm that was coming up from her chest.

She slumped back against the pillows, utterly exhausted. The monitor at her bedside beeped unhappily at her, and she let her eyes drift closed as she tried to regain some control over her breathing.

"I couldn't just… give them the code. I needed to know why… why they were so desperate for it. And then, when I figured out what they were after, I just… I just couldn't give them the code." She still wasn't looking at them, so she missed the odd look on Magnum's face.

"Kumu told me they took you away, tried to get you to tell them the code for safe." He paused for a second, eyes narrowed like he was putting something together. "She said you were soaked when you came back. Shivering. And you told me the guy I shot tried to drown you."

She glanced up at him, eyes flicking to meet his then sliding away again. He looked horrified.

"They waterboarded you because they wanted me." It was a statement of fact, said so calmly that Higgins looked up at him again. But his face wasn't calm; she had rarely seen him look so angry.

"Yes, well, I didn't tell them, so it didn't matter." She was trying to get rid of the atmosphere that had suddenly formed in the room. She didn't need to look around to know her boys were furious. She wanted to say something else, maybe make some sort of joke, but the door opened and her doctor walked in.

"I'm going to have to ask you all to leave."

Higgins was almost glad; she didn't know how to deal with so many people being so worried on her behalf. She put her boys out of her mind.

She breathed and coughed when the doctor told her, nodded along to his explanation of what was going on in her lungs, and, when the three men were allowed back in, cut off anything they were planning on saying about torture or interrogation with the news that she was being discharged.

…

Three days and she still felt awful. She was also going stir crazy though. So she made her slow way down the stairs, gripping the banister with as much strength as she could muster. Her head was spinning so much that she spent the entire time convinced she was only a second away from toppling over. But she made it eventually and sank down onto the couch with as deep a sigh as she could manage without triggering the infernal cough that didn't seem to have gotten any better.

She didn't notice when Magnum came in, jumping as he spoke.

"Should you be out of bed?"

"Probably not. But I can't keep staring at my bedroom walls without going completely insane."

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes.

"Look, Higgins, I know I'm not an expert. I'm not a doctor or a shrink, but I do have some relevant experience. If you need to talk about what happened, you know I'm here, right? And Rick and T.C. too. If you don't wanna talk to me, you can talk to them." He looked so earnest, so very concerned about her, that she couldn't help the slight wobble to her smile.

"I know. Thank you."

More silence followed, broken when Higgins yawned. Magnum immediately stood and offered to leave so she could take a nap, but she shook her head.

"It's fine. I won't sleep." She hadn't meant to say that. She hadn't been sleeping much at all, but she hadn't been planned on telling him that. He was looking at her with such worry in his eyes that she instantly wished she could take back the words.

"Why won't you sleep?" His voice was gentle, and she knew that, if she said she didn't want to talk about it, he would let it drop. But, if she was honest, his offer to listen had touched her.

"I can't sleep," she explained, finally. "I still feel cold, and I'm still struggling to catch my breath. So when I lie down and the room is dark, it's… it's like I'm back on that sun lounger." There were tears in her eyes. She hated that she was nearly crying, but Magnum either didn't notice or didn't care. "It's really hard to sleep when you keep jerking upright, screaming, and clawing at your own face to remove a cloth that isn't there."

She didn't look up at him, afraid she would see pity on his face. She should have known better.

He moved to stand in front of her, then crouched and took her hands in his. "Do you trust me?"

She didn't hesitate. "Yes, of course."

"Can I try to help?" He held her gaze as her mind raced, but, in the end, all she could do was nod. He smiled warmly, then sat next to her and held out his arms. She frowned at him.

"I can't do anything about your shortness of breath, or how dark it's gonna be when you close your eyes. But, you can't lie down, right? I can make sure you stay sitting up. You still feel cold, but I'm perfectly warm." He grinned, a genuine smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle. "I'm not saying it's the best idea in the world. But it might help."

An hour later, when Rick and T.C. found the guest house empty, they walked into the common area in the main house to find their friends curled up on the couch. Higgins was sitting on the couch, her legs hooked over Magnum's lap, her head and one hand resting against his chest. Both his arms were wrapped tightly around her waist, his head was tipped back, and they were both fast asleep.


End file.
